I goto a customer's site because their tape drive is basically pooched. I took this server down and basically I'm checking bios and post bios ctrl+c type windows. Stupid ibm servers take a billion years to boot up and then only give you 1.3 seconds to press any of these buttons. Naturally I need to hit these immediately.

Now this building has 2 businesses and they are both customers. The customer which I wasn't there for comes to me in the server room and is like, 'I have a problem come fix it.' I'm ask what's the problem. She says 'Wifi is down' and I pull out my phone and I have even connected to their wifi... I surf to google. Wifi is definitely up. So I ask who is having problems? She says, 'no one its the laptop that nobody uses that cant get on wifi.' I'm sure she saw me roll my eyes but i say, 'Well this server is down so at least 3 people aren't working at the moment and I need to get it back up running.' Then she's like, 'This is very important and I think it's your fault it's down.' I say, 'Well I can't drop what I'm doing right now but soon as I can' She's says, 'So you're not going to fix it now?' and I just say no. Which she storms off and clearly is extremely mad.

Other customer walks over to me and says, 'You know she's going to just call your boss immediately' and I nodded. That person then immediately sends an email to my boss explaining what happened which was extremely thorough. Like 10 mins later I got to a point where I could walk away for a moment. I hook this laptop up to the wifi and that was that and I go back to checking out the server. Like half an hour later I'm done the server and I'm just standing in the lobby talking. This woman comes back downstairs and sees im just standing around. She gets even more mad and starts chewing me out and I just raise my hand like stop and she stops and I say I already joined the laptop to the wifi and the problem is fixed. She then gestures to have me walk away with her and I follow to where nobody is around to hear us. She says, "I understand that a server is down but those people don't matter; I'm more important and should get highest priority. However you see what happened there right? I called your boss and you immediately fixed my problem, that's way it should be.'

In reality she called my boss and he didn't answer his phone because he saw caller id... and she kept calling over and over and eventually went to my desktop support guy who basically was told that wifi was down and he said we wouldn't be able to fix it until we got over there anyway so she just has to wait until he can get someone on site. He didn't know where I was. She's like, "Tell munky9001 to go fix it immediately" and he just said, 'I don't know where he is' and she hung up on him.

My boss didn't even need our sides of the story; he just read the email from another customer and gave her a call to 'set expectations' and apparently she broke out crying again.

I've been ill for over a month. Recovering now. Also in the middle of putting together a proposal for the government department I've been working with, so sleep has been in short supply. Bleah. I will return when slightly less dead.

I have no idea what I would ACTUALLY do but in my daydream I look at the laptop, sigh, and say "it's a hardware problem, you need a new wifi board because the RAM is stuck in it," in a sad voice, then let her know that if I order a new one RIGHT NOW I might get it next Tuesday.

Now back story on why she's saying it was my fault. I had fixed their wifi maybe a month prior... it's basically a 1st generation WRT54G and it hasn't had any problems since it was put in and I didn't have any information. So basically I powercycled it which fixed it. Then I wanted to pull information from it like IP and such. So naturally it even took me a good 15mins just to figure out what the password was set to.

So in her mind though is that I mustnt have done my job and just because lots of people were actively using it doesn't mean it was completely fixed if there's 1 laptop that was having problems.

She does this so often. 1 person sending attachments from outlook to their blackberry only receives winmail.dat. She left this long voicemail like 8 minutes of her ideas of what caused it and it's basically a list in reverse chronological order of every problem they had previously. I almost saved the recording but then realized im just going to make myself more mad.

For me i was always more hands on in IT. I always did hardware support repair, run cable, rack and stack, ect. i never knew networking or AD or linux, anything like that, but i can stand next to most printers, listen to it print and tell you whats wrong. It's just where my talents lie.

If you work in IT long enough you will eventually run into someone like this. If you make a long career out of IT you will run into people like this several times. If you aren't prepared ahead of time you may go off on them which will just make things worse. The only way to deal with these people is to stay calm and always take the higher ground.

I have a mantra that I use in situations like this, "you can't argue with crazy".

As a man that is merely engaged I have no choice but to bow to your wisdom. Reason is a much better word. You do have to admit that phrase (with your correction) is a very succinct method of describing a very difficult problem.

That is completely reasonable. She's self important, "entitled" and doesn't know her place (and I don't mean that in a sexist "women should know their place" way). I'm glad your boss handled it properly.

I feel a little bad for her. I might be way off the mark here, but something about the way OP described her made her sound a little...unstable? Her reactions just seem so incredibly unbelievable that it makes me wonder if she might not be all there.

The problem with that and I see it constantly... when a customer is billable the proactive stuff doesn't get done and more issues just pop up constantly and they also tend to be more severe. So in the end sure it'll be more profitable but you also will be dealing with her more.

So naturally we keep her managed and do the right thing AND hire and train a minion to deal with her.

none related story, but one of our client got a notorious manager, and there is one guy is being her bitch... i mean working under her. eventually, he got fed up, left the company, applied a job at our company asking specifically to be the PM for his previous employer.

i asked him why, he said: i can finally bitch back at her without consequences

We have some people like that... "I know the wifi is working perfectly for the other 50 people in the building, but clearly it's broken entirely and it's your fault because my shitty old laptop/ipad/whatever can't magically enter ssid/psk itself!"

She's in her 60s and she still lives at home with her mom. As far as I'm told she has never had any long term relationships. She doesn't even have any particular skill to be working at the place except for the owner of the place being her brother.

Hated that when working with private bankers...a network outage in one of the more populated buildings you say, send the network techs to the sparsely populated headquarters building to fix that one network outlet the boss never uses but might maybe need to use someday when the devil need fuel for heating.

Did she give any explanation as to why she was more important? Can you think of one? Like, does her company pay more or anything? It doesn't have to be a good reason, I'm just curious why she would possibly think that she has priority over other customers.

She doesn't. Infact the other customer is the one flipping the bill for the internet connection and infrastructure. So she pays less then the customer I was fixing up. So she in the managed bill is paying for about 9 hours/month. She easily blows past that 9 hours with stupid little things like this.

Though only about 4 hours so far this month. A few hours next week for sure.

nuisance fee is already in there. She's paying 9 hours for 1 quiet server that basically takes no maintenance and effectively 3 workstations since the other customer handles the rest of the environment. Now I don't know exactly what was said but I'm betting she was offered 'higher priority status' fee which is quite ridiculous pricing and nobody has yet gone for it.

The only nice thing is that she isn't one of my customers which expects me to be on call 24/7. Contract says 9-4 and our 24/7 on call fee is basically triple the price they pay now. Nobody has gone for that yet.

This reminds me of a story a guy I work with he told me he used to work tech support.

I forget exactly how the story went but the gist of it is he would would often be speaking to people in the que demanding to be bumped up to the front of the line. So he said "Sure! Right away." which often made the person speechless.

Then he said "But you realize the next person who calls and asks me the same thing will also get placed at the top of the waiting list, which means you will be second, then third then fourth etc. Or you could just wait your turn."

Next time you get shit like that tell her that she does not control the order in which you do things and it would be a breach of protocol to help her first.

We dont really do much that is formal like this. My boss thinks I did it perfectly by just saying 'I can do it soon as I'm done what I was doing'

Also always call people out on lies immediately

Oh I had no idea if she had lied; all I said was 'nobody has contacted me, they don't know my cellphone number because I'm looking to jump to wind mobile SOON.' Even if I had knew she lied I probably wouldn't have said much as it wouldn't gain anything.

never walk somewhere private to talk. This is HR 101...

I dunno about this one. I don't have a problem speaking privately to anyone and I certainly don't hold back if I want to. Also we aren't the same business. I'm an IT business and they are a customer. If we get fired... the only problem we have is liver failure from all the champagne and when they inevitable become customers again they'll be paying for it. Though this naturally isn't probable at all. If it ever came down to us getting fired... the brother would be involved and he's quite rational and logical.

Its kinda funny as I'm the only 1 who will ongoing deal with her. Every time there's one of these events people come and say 'dont stress out' or 'dont feel bad' and each time I just dont really care about the event. It's just funny to me.

Heh I mainly don't much care because I know my boss has my back and moreover, where is this customer even going to go? They cant fire us. They can't hire someone because they'll just quit in no time. The only real competitor in my city which could handle this customer without firing them is about to explode themselves. Afterall that's what happens when you shotgun clause 2 partners out of the business and you're paying them 75,000$/month; you pay your techs just slightly above minimum wage... you only hold onto derp techs who cant go elsewhere; you take commission away from your sales team and they all quit except 1; and you're losing customers left and right because what you claim you're doing isn't actually happening.

For example we picked up a billable customer who has a bad taste in their mouth over managed services because they had managed services and their raid array lost 1 too many disks. They got lied to and were told that 2 disks failed at the same times. We go in and show them the disks had been failing for months. Another customer had terminal servers in a cluster going on. They kept complaining they were very slow and each time they were told, 'yep out of resources you need to buy another one' mind you they didnt even detect they were out of resources until told it was slow. They think kaseya can be used like a network monitor... they are wrong. We go in and setup a network monitor. Oh yes basically all these servers are running like 10-20 gigs into swap. How much ram do they even had total? 4 gigs. What? Why are terminal servers running just 4 gigs of ram? Well their excuse was 'the ram was never delivered so the techs never put it in.' customer calls ibm and their tracking #s show it was sign for at the same time the hardware was put in. Customer demands the ram they paid for... oh they need to turn off their servers afterhours to take the ram out. Mind you... not the customer's servers... their own servers. They just used the customer's ram i guess? Now the customer is auditing absolutely everything but doesn't really have documentation of their own.

Then factor in this business was kicked out of their previous offices because they didnt pay rent. They moved into a new place and only could pay the first month's rent and the contract literally has given them 0 notice removal from the offices if they miss their rent payment. Naturally after this they had drywallers and electrical go in and make this office work for them. They just didnt pay those people. They are now being sued.

but I thoroughly enjoyed hearing about this company. Holy crap. How do people like that even exist..

Well it's pretty interesting how they got to the point they had. Originally the only IT outsourcing place in the city was a novell shop and my boss saw everywhere else in the world was going microsoft and push them to go microsoft and they refused and basically muzzled him. So instead he started this business... he found a partner to startup with and naturally they took off and did extremely well. Well the novell shop was bankrupt and their book of business was up for sale and the price was 1 year contract for the accountant. He basically wanted a job and they thought hey great... they'll get 1 year's work out of the guy and get rid of him because he's an idiot and they'll get a bunch of new customers.

You don't buy new customers though... they got no new customers from it. Then they had this failure accountant to put to work. No big deal whatever... business is hard sometimes. However the partner was seeing success... started buying new toys and was sitting back and letting the employees do the work. However my boss didn't like that... keep pushing the buck and get bigger so you can be a good employer. Now this accountant then go to this partner... 'if you shotgun clause the other guy and make me a partner I won't be after you to get you to work and I'll run everything' They shotgun my boss out of the business. Which considering the business' value and such at that time... that was a big chunk of cash. All the techs are asked to take pay cuts... the good techs quit instead because they pay wasn't that great all along and it was mostly just about being a fun job. It wasn't anymore.

Couple years later now there's multiple IT businesses competing; and my boss' noncompetes are up and he starts the business I am working for now. That bad business was still paying that nice big debt and looky looky they need to cut costs again... they are already paying their techs basically minimum wage at this point. Shotgun clause against the partner who wasnt doing anything. Now they couldn't even get a loan this time so they agree to pay $75,000/month to eventually pay it off. So they are still paying ridiculous cash just for getting rid of the 2 original founders. They have bimonthly rehiring of important techs because they just leave soon as they can for better pay and better working conditions. They have 2 unpaid interns for every actual worker they have there. So naturally they are dropping the ball constantly and that's what loses you customers.

You can see what in the last few months has been happening; they're dead. It's very unfortunate as I have friends who work there but their reputations are burnt and nobody will hire them in IT now. Moreover, we aren't big enough to take on all their customers. Afterall they just have kaseya on there and that's it... they get thousands of event logs per hour and nobody goes through them. Their form of managed services is, 'you pay us and we are available when something bad happens' whereas my managed services is lots of proactive work. We can't take on large customers or those customers where we know there's lots of work to be done.

When you have 2 partners of equal ownership over a business. You have a shotgun clause where 1 partner has the option to offer to buy the other person out but if they don't offer enough you buy them out for that amount. So partner wants to buy out the other partner but lets say the business is worth 10 million. Lets say you offer 4million. Obviously that doesn't work because the person being bought out takes the deal and buys out the other person. However if you offer 6million then the guy being bought out just takes it and walks.

Now obviously there's a problem picking a value because there isnt really a way to value a business like that very easily plus there's future value and blah blah. Basically the person being bought out almost always is offered way more then they are worth.

My boss got a big lump sum too which the business took a big loan to pay off. They no longer have the credit to get that money so the 2nd partner didn't get a big lump sum and is getting $75,000/month. Which takes years to pay off. They managed to survive a few years but a couple giant customers recently have been dealing with failure after failure. They are looking elsewhere.

I always wondered about people like that. They clearly have unresolved psychological issues. Maybe CS and IT workers should be given some basic psychology training so we can let people know specifically that they're crazy, and maybe even prescribe some meds? :)

Would be fun to give a psych evaluation to someone's boss after a crazy encounter.

Have you ever gone and done techsupport on site anywhere? You go there for X and YZABCDEF problems suddenly pop up. Also that's basically what I said, 'I can check it out in a few minutes.' Once I saw that wifi was working the actual impact of the problem obviously wasn't severe.

Yuk - I hate people like that. We have a few thousand customers and there are certain ones that ring up and expect us to drop everything to deal with them and them alone.

Most of my work is done remotely but some of my clients have no concept of the fact they are not my only client to deal with and that their being unhappy with where the print button is may actually be less important that the poor sap whose network connections just went tits up and/or they cannot find their data anywhere.

A quote from my colleague (which I am sure I have used here before) Head...Wall...Bang!

If anyone behaves like that, whip out your phone and start videoing them, if they ask what you're doing, say that you're going to report them to HR for abuse, and you are gathering video evidence to serve as proof. You should never have to deal with people being vile and abusive like that.

How would I improve this because I still don't even follow what 'narrative flare' is. Do I simply lack details like explaining what she even looks like and her smell? Or is it just missing every little step?

Homeboy wants a perfectly written slice o' life, with heroes and damsels in distress, because he fancies himself a writer. The problem is that he is fourteen and only posts to some gaming sub and does not know the difference between affect and effect.

You are doing fine and if you find your self writing more of these things you will become better at it. Not that you are not good now, I enjoyed your post and really love your sense of humor:

Huh, I'm a little confused are you attacking? If so why... my posting wasn't exactly condescending.

I was just responding to Thatdudewiththestuff comment about narrative flow and the lack of it that in recent postings... Which is true to a degree... Well rather a lot of the older posting were more heavily upvoted if the poster created a bit of a mini arch to the story.

Thatdudewiththestuff is who I am referring to. Of course we love stories that have a sparkle to them. I also love stores that let me see the inner workings of businesses and the IT profession in general and don't really expect to be entertained on top of that with a bunch of literary flourish.

Thatdudewiththestuff was quite mean spirited and if you look at his post history you will see what I am referring to and I thought a little turn about was fair play.